petition you to invite the neutral powers to confer with the
United States of America for the purpose of requesting Britain, France,
and Germany to withdraw from the soil of Belgium and fight out their
quarrel on their own territories. However the sympathies of the neutral
States may be divided, and whatever points now at issue between the
belligerent powers may be doubtful, there is one point on which there
can be neither division nor doubt, and that is that the belligerent
armies have no right to be in Belgium, much less to fight in Belgium,
and involve the innocent inhabitants of that country in their reciprocal
slaughter. You will not question my right to address this petition to
you. You are the official head of the nation that is beyond all question
or comparison the chief of the neutral powers, marked out from all the
rest by commanding magnitude, by modern democratic constitution, and by
freedom from the complication of monarchy and its traditions, which have
led Europe into the quaint absurdity of a war waged formally between the
German Kaiser, the German Czar, the German King of the Belgians, the
German King of England, the German Emperor of Austria, and a gentleman
who shares with you the distinction of not being related to any of them,
and is therefore describable monarchically as one Poincare, a Frenchman.

I make this petition on its merits, without claiming any representative
character except such as attaches to me as a human being. Nobody here
has asked me to do it. Except among the large class of constitutional
beggars, the normal English feeling is that it is no use asking for a
thing if you feel certain that it will be refused, and are not in a
position to enforce compliance. Also, that the party whose request is
refused and not enforced looks ridiculous. Many Englishmen will say that
a request to the belligerents to evacuate Belgium forthwith would be
refused; could not be enforced; and would make the asker ridiculous. We
are, in short, not a prayerful nation. But to you it will be clear that
even the strongest power, or even allied group of powers, can have its
position completely changed by an expression of the public opinion of
the rest of the world. In your clear western atmosphere and in your
peculiarly responsible position as the head centre of western democracy,
you, when the European situation became threatening three months ago,
must have been acutely aware of the fact to which Europe was so f